Free SSL Certificates and Setup for Evermore Customers

We have an exciting announcement to make about free enhancements coming to every Evermore site!

But first, I’d like to start this quick note to you by being honest about something that bugs me:

If there’s one thing we don’t do well at Evermore right now, it’s conveying the value we give you by taking care of extremely technical issues.

How Evermore Minimizes Website Complexity

Keeping your site fast and secure involves so many details that are so nerdy. It’s not just keeping things up-to-date, encouraging strong passwords, and configuring some complex plugins for you—all of which we do—it’s other things like:

Running plugin updates through a variety of tests before deploying to your website

Manually vetting the quality of new features and plugins through literally reading the code (which can be a lot) and evaluating them against WordPress community standards

I’ll bet you weren’t aware that we do all of the above and more on a daily basis, or that there have been some serious security risks to your website that we fixed without you having to worry at all. Other web hosts might not do anything about these risks at all; some of the more expensive ones will fix them for you, but they’ll send highly technical emails to you about it instead of just doing it.

The reason we keep quiet about them is because you have enough on your plate! We designed the Evermore platform in such a way that we can take care of these details and allow you to focus on the parts of your site that benefit most from your knowledge and creativity: content and branding.

Announcing: Free SSL Certificates and Setup for Evermore Customers

This time, I want to briefly explain the value of why we’re transitioning Evermore sites to use “HTTPS encryption” by default, and why we’re handling it differently than other hosts.

By the end of January 2017, we will transition any sites that allow us to manage their DNS (almost 100%) to HTTPS. This includes installing an SSL certificate and setting everything up.

Practically speaking, this means that your website will go from http://example.com to https://example.com.

Traditionally, the process of setting up SSL certificates has been extremely technical and difficult—believe me, I’ve done it plenty of times! Even purchasing and renewing these certificates is daunting. However, the web community has advanced significantly in the last year or two to make these certificates free and easier to work with.

As other web hosts move to make this easier, they’ve begun sending long instructions to their customers on how to enable HTTPS—we’d rather just do it for you. One wrong step can lead to a broken site, and you don’t have time for that when you’re busy starting a new year.

There is nothing for you to do at all. One morning, you’ll log into your website to see that the address bar shows https://example.com, and everything will continue to work exactly as it has!

If you have any questions about any of these nerdy details or about the process (or want to know more about all those items I mentioned at the beginning), get in touch and we’ll be happy to chat with you.